Fuzzy Math

I'm no mathematician... However, even if I'm way off on a couple figures, this holds together pretty well...

1.) It costs the U.S. about $1 MILLION to keep 1 troop in Afghanistan for 1 year. (widely reported) For this exercise, I'm assuming soldiers in Iraq cost about the same.
2.) In 2010, there will be over 102,000 troops in Afghanistan.
3.) There are still 130,000 troops in Iraq.

This is excluding thousands of 'support troops' and other differently classified soldiers, so I'm rounding up to 250,000 troops deployed in our wars. At $1 MILLION per soldier, I'm looking at
$250,000,000,000 in 2010.

4.) There are 15.4 MILLION unemployed in the U.S. as of November. (10% unemployment) These people wish they could have a job, just about any job would be fine.

Conclusion:
We could give over 2/3 (10 MILLION) of the unemployed people in our country meager $25,000 a year jobs paid directly out of the government coffers if we weren't mired in 2 foreign wars that have relatively little to do with defending our country.
Don't get me wrong: $25,000 a year is nothing, but it would bring our unemployment under 5% and get them working until industry can offer them better jobs. Which industry could give them better jobs faster if they were employed and able to buy some things.

Think of what we could do if we had 10 MILLION extra government employees for a year. Sure, most of their time and efforts would be wasted in bureaucratic red tape, but even our government couldn't squander all that time without doing something good.

I'm not saying this is a wise idea. I'm just musing on what we might have done differently with our money...

THIS is whyipaytaxes.